Microsoft asks appeals court to kill Word sales injunction

Microsoft has filed an emergency motion with the US District Court for Eastern …

Microsoft has filed a motion to stay an injunction imposed by a federal court which threatens to halt sales of some versions of its ubiquitous Office Word application. In a filing with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, Microsoft also asked for an expedited review of its appeal against the ruling, arguing that the injunction could cause "irreparable harm" to the software giant's business and to its partners while also saying that "major public disruption" will result if Word 2010 has to be redesigned. If upheld, the injunction wouldn't stop existing users from using Word, but it could prevent Redmond from selling Word 2003 or Word 2007, and would require the company to significantly tweak Word 2010, which is slated for the first half of next year.

"Microsoft filed a motion with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to seek an expedited review of its appeal and to stay the permanent injunction while the appeal is pending," a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. "These filings are not unusual in patent cases. As we've maintained throughout this process, we believe the evidence clearly demonstrates that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We look forward to filing our appeal and to Court of Appeals review."

Last week,
a federal court in the patent litigation wonderland of eastern Texas
issued an injunction that gave Microsoft 60 days to stop shipping any
recent version of Word, based on a patent that was found to cover the
XML formatting used by the software. Microsoft's move here is an obvious attempt to buy time. The ruling, which followed one from May 2009 where Microsoft was found to be infringing one of the patents, was in favor of a Canadian company by the name of i4i. Word 2003 and Word 2007 both overstep i4i's patent by using extensible markup language (XML) for encoding and customizing XML in a specific way (US Patent No. 5,787,449).